Editors’ note: In light of the ongoing controversy surrounding the Trump campaign’s alleged “collusion” with the Russian government during the 2016 US presidential election, which now involvesTrump Jr. daring to talk to a Russian woman, Frontpage has deemed it important to bring attention to a forgotten story of verifiable scheming with the Kremlin — by the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy against President Ronald Reagan. We are reprinting below Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s 2008 interview with Dr. Paul Kengor, who unearthed documentation detailing Kennedy’s outreach to the KGB and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov during the height of the Cold War, in which the Democratic Senator offered to collude with the Soviets to undermine President Reagan.

Ted Kennedy and the KGB.
Frontpage Magazine,May 15, 2008.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Paul Kengor, the author of the New York Times extended-list bestsellerGod and Ronald Reaganas well asGod and George W. BushandThe Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.He is also the author of the first spiritual biography of the former first lady,God and Hillary Clinton: A Spiritual Life.He is a professor of political science and director of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College.

FP:Paul Kengor, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.

Kengor:Always great to be back, Jamie.

FP:We’re here today to revisit Ted Kennedy’s reaching out to the KGB during the Reagan period. Refresh our readers’ memories a bit.

Kengor:The episode is based on a document produced 25 years ago this week. I discussed it with you inour earlier interviewback in November 2006. In my book,The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, I presented a rather eye-opening May 14, 1983 KGB document on Ted Kennedy. The entire document, unedited, unabridged, is printed in the book, as well as all the documentation affirming its authenticity. Even with that, today, almost 25 years later, it seems to have largely remained a secret.

FP:Tell us about this document.

Kengor:It was a May 14, 1983 letter from the head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, to the head of the USSR, the odious Yuri Andropov, with the highest level of classification. Chebrikov relayed to Andropov an offer from Senator Ted Kennedy, presented by Kennedy’s old friend and law-school buddy, John Tunney, a former Democratic senator from California, to reach out to the Soviet leadership at the height of a very hot time in the Cold War. According to Chebrikov, Kennedy was deeply troubled by the deteriorating relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, which he believed was bringing us perilously close to nuclear confrontation. Kennedy, according to Chebrikov, blamed this situation not on the Soviet leadership but on the American president—Ronald Reagan. Not only was the USSR not to blame, but, said Chebrikov, Kennedy was, quite the contrary, “very impressed” with Andropov.

The thrust of the letter is that Reagan had to be stopped, meaning his alleged aggressive defense policies, which then ranged from the Pershing IIs to the MX to SDI, and even his re-election bid, needed to be stopped. It was Ronald Reagan who was the hindrance to peace. That view of Reagan is consistent with things that Kennedy said and wrote at the time, including articles in sources like Rolling Stone (March 1984) and in a speeches like his March 24, 1983 remarks on the Senate floor the day after Reagan’s SDI speech, which he lambasted as “misleading Red-Scare tactics and reckless Star Wars schemes.”

He Fights

July 13, 2017

By Evan Sayet Evan Sayetis the author ofThe KinderGarden of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Thinks. His lecture to the Heritage Foundation on this same topic remains, some ten years later, by far the single most viewed lecture in their history. Evan can be reached at contactevansayet@gmail.com.

JULY 17, 2017

He Fights

Evan Sayet

7/13/2017 1:57:00 PM – Evan Sayet

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.” Here’s my answer:

We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency. We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain? We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney? And the results were always the same.

This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ‘60s. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale. It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the universities – till today.

The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

Trump Grinds the G20, the Bureaucratic Underground, and CNN into Hamburger

This was a week of startling contrasts. The President reasserted (against a decades-long leftist attack on it) the significant achievements of Western civilization and the need to vigorously defend it. Hisspeech prefaced the G20 meetingin Hamburg, whereleftists rioted, burned, and looted while the G20 leaders ponced about and wined and dined in style, apparently oblivious to the havoc which theiropen border policiesand multiculturalist mindset had birthed. As Trump worked successfully on trade and defense issues in Europe, his administration was quietly plugging security leaks and maladministration in our own bureaucratic underground.

A. Poland

Western Europe has been blinded by ideological nonsense. On the one hand it has worked assiduously to separate religion and politics. On the other hand, it has welcomed in hordes of Islamists. In contrast, to quoteZoltan Balog, Hungary’s Minister for Human Resources “in the case of Islam it is religion that determines politics.”

Eastern Europe, in particular Poland, was the right place to defend Western culture and values. And Trump did so brilliantly to the great delight of the thousands who flocked to hear him.

Here’s what actually happened this week, the “news” that holds real consequences for real Americans:

• Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed an order to begin reopening Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve to oil and gas exploration, reversing the Obama administration’s ideologically driven 2013 shutdown. The order even aims at opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to production—a move that is decades overdue. This could not only buck up the listless Alaskan economy but cement the U.S. as an oil and gas powerhouse.

• In related news, the Dakota Access Pipeline finally went live.

• The Fish and Wildlife Service took steps that may stop the Obama administration’s last-minute endangered-species listing for the Texas Hornshell, a freshwater mussel. That listing, based on outdated science, threatens significant harm to the Texas economy and was done over the protest of state officials and local industry.

REGIME CHANGE BY ANY OTHER NAME?by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, to appear in October from Basic Books

May 22, 2017

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: We are now watching insidious regime change, aimed at removing the president of the United States not because of what he has done so far, but because of his personality and what he might do to the Obama agenda — and because for a variety of cultural reasons, our elite simply despises his very being.

Truth or consequences? Obama skated for far worse misdeeds. Election machines in three states were not hacked to give Donald Trump the election. There was never a serious post-election movement of electors to defy their constitutional duties and vote for Hillary Clinton. Nor, once Trump was elected, did transgendered people begin killing themselves in alarming numbers. Nor were there mass resignations at the State Department upon his inauguration.

Nor did Donald Trump seek an order to “ban all Muslims” from entering the U.S. Instead, he temporarily sought a suspension in visas for everyone, regardless of religion, from seven Middle Eastern states that the Obama administration had earlier identified as incapable of properly vetting travelers to the U.S. The first lady did not work for an elite escort or prostitute service. She never said that she and young Barron Trump would not be moving to the White House. Barron does not have autism. Trump’s father never ran racist ads as a supposed candidate in a purported political campaign. Kellyanne Conway denies that in a private conversation between segments on MSNBC, she privately remarked to hosts that she had to take a shower after working for Trump. Donald Trump never suggested to the Mexican president that the U.S. was going to invade Mexico. Nor did Trump plan to mobilize the National Guard to send back illegal aliens. He did not remove a Martin Luther King bust from the White House. There was no evidence that he ever promised to ease Russian sanctions (much less that he promised the Russians he would be “flexible” after he was elected). He did not short the FBI of resources to conduct an investigation into supposed Russian collusion. He did not go to Moscow and watch prostitutes in his bed urinate where Barack Obama had previously slept. His deputy attorney general did not threaten to resign over the Comey firing.

IIn 2008 a young Russian lawyer calledSergei Magnitskyuncovered a massive tax fraud. He found evidence that a group of well-connected Russian officials had stolen a whopping $230m. The same officials had Magnitsky arrested; he was tossed into a freezing cell and refused medical treatment. Magnitsky – who suffered from pancreatitis and gall stones – spent months in pain. This state-sanctioned torture was meant to make him withdraw his testimony. He didn’t. One day his condition grew critical. Guards put him in an isolation cell. There, they beat him to death.

Magnitsky’s case was to become the most notorious and best-documented example of human rights abuse in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. That this happened was down to one man: Bill Browder, a US-born financier and the CEO of a successful asset management company. Once a Putin fan, Browder found himself in trouble in 2005 when he was deported from Russia. He hired a team, including Magnitsky. When the Kremlin got nasty, most of the lawyers fled. Magnitsky – a family man with two small boys, who liked Beethoven – refused to leave. He believed the law would protect him, that Russia had said farewell to its Soviet ghosts. It was a tragic misjudgment.

Red Noticeis a dramatic, moving and thriller-like account of how Magnitsky’s death transformed Browder from hedge-fund manager to global human rights crusader. Its title refers to the extradition request served by Russia on Interpol, demanding Browder’s arrest. (A Russian court later jailed him in absentia for nine years.) In truth, there are quite a few pretenders to the exalted post of “Putin’s No 1 Enemy”, as he describes himself. They include Michael Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch whom Putin (pictured) jailed and sent to Siberia. There is the lateBoris Berezovsky, another tycoon who fell out with Russia’s grudge-bearer-in-chief and decamped to London, playing Trotsky to Putin’s Stalin. OrAlexei Navalny, the Moscow opposition leader, currently under house arrest. Or the murderedAlexander Litvinenko, poisoned in a Mayfair hotel with radioactive green tea.